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RenFaire Sunday

We headed up to the Bristol Renaissance Faire on Sunday. We got there a bit later than we might have hoped, mostly (I think) due to my own lateness getting out of bed and functional, but we got a nutritious breakfast into everyone before going, so I will count that as a plus.

The kids had a great time running around looking in stores, buying a few things, and enjoying various shows along with us. I didn't spend much time in the stores as Gretchen and I own a great many things and there were a variety of attractive benches available, as the crowd seemed a bit thin. I don't know if this was because the weather so far this summer has been miserably hot, but today the weather was quite nice and didn't get much above 80 degrees.

We came home, fed takeout Chinese to the kids and got the Midkiffs on the road home once again later than we might have hoped, but fed. :)

Overall, I will count this as a successful weekend.

And now I am going to go take a cold shower and cool off. :)

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: see post

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Done Since 2025-07-06

It's been a week. Starting with my son's fortieth birthday, and ending with the fourth anniversary of Colleen's death. I started writing a "state of the Bear" post last Sunday, and will either finish it today or tomorrow, or give up on it. But productive.

I went out for a walk four days this week -- the longest was about a kilometer, and the shortest was 650m. I practiced every day, which I haven't done for a long time. And, at N's suggestion, I started a work log, to keep track of what I've done for our business. I'll write it up separately, of course, but it's been remarkably effective. See under Monday for the start, but it's all been moved out of Dog/to.do to different file and workspace, which will mostly not find its way into this log, although pieces might.

It also shows how appallingly lazy I've been for the last six months.

Not really surprising -- I've been retired for eight years, and I've allowed myself to get out of shape in a great many ways. It's probably too late to get back to where I was a decade ago, but I'll do what I can.

And of course, the best-laid plans... Friday N and I started putting together a piece of patio furniture, and wore ourselves out completely. And yesterday was Colleen's day and I actually got more done than I expected. Weekends are for catching up.

As for links, AI coding tools make developers slower, study finds • The Register. As I've often said, HTML Is Publishing, Not Code

And this is flat-out amazing: Hundreds of robots move Shanghai city block - YouTube

( Notes & links, as usual )

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One More Step

Jen finished recording the bass parts for the six songs that we'd targeted for this weekend, so we'll call that a complete success. :)

Dinner tonight was a lovely brisket, mashed potatoes, green beans, and rolls.

Tomorrow, off to the RenFaire. (And then back to Indianapolis for the Midkiffs...)

The kids are still having fun downstairs, which is all good.

Current Mood: quietly grieving
Current Location: Schildhaven Centraal - woonkamer
Current Music: Eyes Like the Morning

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River: Remembering the FlowerCat: Four years after

Colleen died four years ago, at 04:30 Pacific time, so probably around the time I finish this post. It seems like a long time ago, or maybe just a few days. Or two moves. I'm surrounded by memories. Memorabilia. Every so often I'm struck by how many of my things have stories attached to them; many of them involving Colleen. To be expected -- we were together for half a century.

The world is very different from what it was four years ago, mostly not for the better; there are many things that I miss. And of course people. Too many people.

It's 1pm; we lit a candle for Colleen an hour ago, and toasted her memory, and talked for a bit. N found some purple flowers in the front planter to set in a bowl next to the candle. A candle makes a good focus for giving her a silent update. It's been a nice, quiet remembrance.

I'm going to post this, and sing a couple of songs. See whether I get through Eyes Like the Morning without falling apart.

Colleen, I will always love you.

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Midkiffs!

Jen and the kids arrived a bit later than they hoped, but earlier than they might have. While the kids were out with Finn collecting free Slurpees from 7-11, we went down to the basement and got a couple of takes of Jen on the bass for "Inconstant Moon" so we could get an idea of what was working. It all sounded good and we will do the minor editing tomorrow before we go on to the rest of the tracks on the schedule.

But so far, so good!

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Shopping Trip

I am getting one of my blood pressure meds at Jewel/Osco, because when I initially started getting it, the cheapest way for me to obtain it was from their pharmacy via GoodRx. This is no longer true, as the med is now on my formulary for my health insurance, but it's convenient to have a good reason to go to Jewel once a month and buy the things that I can't find elsewhere easily. And the automatic text when it was time for a refill worked splendidly.

Except then they started calling *and* texting, with multiple phone calls for the same prescription, all of which was entirely too much of a good thing. So I set out to cancel the phone calls. Apparently, I canceled everything, which I finally realized when I was staring at one pill remaining and no sign of a refill anywhere. Oops.

I have managed to turn text messaging back on and got my prescription refilled today, so I have my pill for tomorrow. Yay, me! And as long as I was at Jewel, I picked up most of the things that I will need for the weekend. The remaining items can be picked up at Sam's Club tomorrow and possibly at Mariano's depending on how things work out.

And then the refrigerator will be *very* full of brisket...

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Mattress Installation

I wanted to haul Julie's new mattress and the bunkie board upstairs tonight so we could install them in the morning. We did that and this caused the instructions to surface. They said that -- although the mattress will continue to decompress for the next three days -- Julie could go ahead and sleep on it tonight.

So the old mattress is hauled away to the first floor for disposal with the next trash pickup, while the new mattress is happily on the bed and covered with a sheet. My conclusion after trying to find the right sheets to do this with is that it is time to buy more twin-sized sheet sets, because there's a distinct shortage of the fitted ones.

But done is done.

And it turns out that the mattress that died the big death was a Serta which I apparently bought at Sam's Club. I thought that it was a mattress that I'd bought on Amazon, but that must be some other mattress. In any case, I've never seen a mattress die in quite that fashion with a big crater in the middle of the bed.

I am unimpressed. (Well, actually, I *am* impressed, but not in any good way.)

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Tired

I had to get up early today for a meeting which would have been fine. The two phone calls apparently looking for a fax machine that arrived before my alarm was scheduled were *not* fine.

But the meeting went well and broke up early enough that I was able to grab a haircut before the rush, then lunch, and then a trip to Sam's Club to pick up some staples. And I even got work done.

So it was all good.

It will be better when I get some sleep. :)

This week on FilkCast

Julia Ecklar, Feng Shui Ninjas, Cynthia McQuillin, Anne McCaffrey Tania Opland Mike Freeman, Kathy Mar & Zander Nyrond, Water Street Bridge, Summer Russell, Dave Clement, Sunnie Larsen, Brenda Sutton, Bill Roper, Three Weird Sisters, Leslie Fish, Chuck Rein, Lawrence Dean

Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.

filkcast.blogspot.com

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Progress Report

I have managed to replace all of the scratch guitar tracks with guitar tracks that are at least candidates for the released version of "Crosstime Bus", as well as recording new scratch vocals that aren't contaminated with the scratch guitar tracks. All of this is good preparation for the recording session this weekend when Jen comes up.

In the meantime, I'd like to share some work-in-progress with you. "Wings" is one of my favorite songs that I've written and I do not sing it nearly as often as I probably should. The fact that it's 19 years old now probably has something to do with that. It was the last-written song that is going on this album, as I wrote it while we were traveling to the Worldcon back in 2006, which was our last Worldcon before our first child was born -- an event that put an end to our long-distance Worldcon travel.

So here's the current state of the song:

Wings.

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Day Off

I took a day off from studio work today, because I went to the Cubs vs. Cards game down at Wrigley, which was scheduled to start at 5:10 and was only delayed by an hour. But all of that meant that there really wasn't time to get down there, even to record a single vocal track.

Recording is back on the schedule for tomorrow, along with work, where I hope to make some good progress.

Current Mood: between calm and worried
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: Nottamun Town

Entry tags:

Done Since 2025-06-29

It doesn't feel like a very productive week, but I have gotten a few things done. Five (short) walks, four (short) guitar practice sessions, some patio furniture assembled (one Adirondack chair fully assembled, the other partly assembled, table unboxed).

The Adirondak chairs each have a curved, removable leg-rest. It's not exactly an ottoman, so I've decided it needs to be called a nottaman -- hence this post's music.

The weather has gone from unpleasantly hot to pleasantly cool (with a reverse or two) over the course of the week; we are now enjoying a light rain. Or at least I am -- I'm the one who sits closest to the sliding door in the living room. It opens to half the width of the house, and fortunately has a screen behind it. Because cats.

Between ADT and anemia, my body's temperature sensing has become very wonky; I feel like I'm freezing at temperatures that the rest of the household thinks are too hot, but if I put on something warm I quickly become overheated. It is not conducive to sleeping well. I don't so much mind having the cats wake me in the middle of the night, because my bladder is also wonky, but it would be nice to be able to get to (or back to) sleep in a reasonable amount of time. On the flip side, if all goes well I won't have to talk to a urologist until November.

Not much to say about what's going on in the US. But One Million Rising: Strategic Non-Cooperation to Fight Authoritarianism · No Kings looks like something you can do.

And go watch The FIRST images from the RUBIN observatory! - YouTube

( Notes & links, as usual )

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The Stereo Bus Goes Round and Round

I have guitar tracks for the last three songs to replace the scratch track. They may yet need some more work, but they are in good enough shape I think.

I then went back to record revised scratch vocals for those songs so I could drop out the original guitar. I got through two out of three songs before the iPad that I am using for a remote control announced that it was out of power and would like to retire for today.

So tomorrow! Tomorrow will be good for this.

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Once More, With Feeling

Back to the studio again and just about to start recording. We'll see how much I get done.

A note about the new computer. The previous computer, which is still on the network and which needs to keep its unique name, is "Thunderbolt", although the Thunderbolt card that prompted the name has been removed.

The *new* computer is named "Cei-u".

If you know why, you will know exactly why that is appropriate.

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Meanwhile, Back in the Studio

I rambled downstairs today and got back into the studio and worked over three songs for Crosstime Bus, leaving me three to go, all of which are fingerpicked guitar, so they will require a slightly different setup. I'll see if I can get those to behave tomorrow.

One of the songs that I worked on today, "Dance by Starlight", is going to need some fixup before I'm done with it. I wrote that song back in 2005, about ten years after Gretchen and I got married, when I was an ocean away from her at the British filkcon which was very, very full of wedding vibes that weekend. I like the song a lot, which is why it's on the album list.

It is, however, being a pain in the butt, because I wrote it *before* I started using a pick again. When you're not using a pick, you can easily transition between the fingerpicked section at the beginning, the strummed section in the middle, and the fingerpicked section at the end. When you are using a pick, this is not something that can be managed at my skill level.

When I'm playing the song *now*, I have worked out that I can arpeggiate the formerly fingerpicked sections and play them with the pick. However, the timing on that is just slightly different from the timing when fingerpicking. The scratch tracks, which have some accompaniment associated with them already, were played without a pick.

Today's session made it clear to me that I cannot get the fingerpicked section to time out correctly when I'm using a pick. This means that I am going to have to record a separate guitar track for the beginning and end of the song and patch it in around the picked section in the middle. I can do this, of course.

It's just another learning experience. :)

But I really like the song, so it will be worth it.

Current Mood: grateful
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: Nottamun Town -- no idea why

Entry tags:

thanks

Thankful Thursday

Today I am thankful for...

Rain, and a change in the weather. Hot weather is part of why I'm glad I left San Jose. But there are still a lot of things I miss.
Spreadable blue cheese. Gazpacho in hot weather. A fridge with a working ice maker.
Pipes (in the Unix sense), bash, and grep. Honorable mentions to locate, column, and units.
Cuddly cats.

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It Must Be Time For a Vacation

It is clearly time for me to take some vacation days. Most everyone else is at work. :)

We use Gradle for our builds and to automate a number of tasks. One of those tasks is fetching the project files for JDeveloper from our Artifactory, which has the advantage of keeping developers who are less familiar with how things *ought* to work from accidentally checking in changes. Unfortunately, this gave me a problem over the last few days, because I am working on a big, ugly merge. I had loaded the JDeveloper files for the combined project, but the merge had left me with a ton of compile errors and JDeveloper was doing its little trick of "I can't see this perfectly good code over here" during the compile, even after I fixed things.

I decided that the right thing to do was to switch to the JDeveloper files that just look at my group's source code, get that fixed, and then go back to the integrated project. It was a great idea.

Except that Gradle would insist on compiling the code on the branch before it would let me download the JDeveloper files. That would fail (which was not a surprise; it was why I was trying to get the JDev files downloaded) and when that failed the process was done and the JDeveloper files were not downloaded.

Swearing ensued. Asking the build team for a fix ensued, but our U.S. guy is on vacation in India and the rest of the build team is in India as well and didn't seem to grasp the problem. I eventually sent one guy a screenshot of the directory listing showing that I did not actually *have* the JDeveloper files on my machine in this directory. This didn't get me a solution to the problem, but it made me feel better.

I figured I would take most of today off if I didn't get a solution. And I didn't. I answered some emails, went out for a nice lunch with Gretchen, came home, and went upstairs to take care of a few things.

And then I started researching Gradle, because I really know very little about it.

I figured out that what I needed to do was to tell Gradle to pretty please, don't run a compile when running this particular task. I still haven't figured out how to put this in the build.gradle file, but I did figure out how to get the files downloaded by changing my command line options. To wit:

"gradlew loadJDevFiles -x compileJava"

And look! I got my files.

I sent an email with the solution and went off to spend the rest of the day in the studio, because I deserve a vacation.

Starting now. :)

(More about the studio later...)

Current Mood: cool
Current Music: Hotlanta Dixieland Jazz

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squee!,
tee hee

Paradigm Shift

Sometimes the smallest change can alter one's whole perspective, shift one's paradigm, or open up all kinds of options. Here are just three from over the years, all connected with our house.

After about a year of marriage, I got house fever. We were initially hunting for two bathrooms, looked all over various parts of the Atlanta metro area, and came up empty. Then I said, why not look for one bathroom? We soon had an all-brick ranch with 3 [tiny] bedrooms and one bathroom. My dad the contractor was eventually able to turn the water heater room into a small en suite. [note: it was on the south side of town, with lower taxes. Even with his student loans and them not counting my temp income, it was what we could afford.]

I have very routinized food choices. There was one Michaelina's entree I ate several times a week for over two decades [until they quit making it]. Most of that time, I stored them in the freezer door, front to back. After a decade or two, I finally figured out, I could store half again as many in the door, if I stacked them side-to-side, like books on a shelf. [Ironic that it took me so long to figure out, given the hundreds of feet of mostly double-rowed books in the house.]

The main bedroom, kitchen, and living room of our house all came with ceiling fans. The computer room, in the corner that catches full afternoon sun and is thus the warmest room in the house, has no ceiling fan. [My dad said there wasn't enough structure in the ceiling to support one.]

My spouse went to his first SABR [baseball] convention last week - right during the big heat wave. I run hot anyway [like Granny] and spend most of my time reading on the computer. Even with the lovely insulation [airport and bookshelves], not a fun time. I'm short, & the ceiling fans are nearly a foot overhead. Nevertheless, it was warm enough, I lunged, and turned on the living room fan. Leaving it on all the week kept the whole house amazingly cool [nearly 20 degrees cooler than outside].

How did it take me 3+ decades to discover this delightful fact? Normally, I'd feel all kinds of doofy, but am too busy being rather chill about the whole thing.

;)

We are off through July ...

... but we still have shows for you. We put the question up on FB, your favorite songs about books. We got quite a list! Five shows worth, with more to come later in the year or next January!

This week on FilkCast
Maureen O'Brien, Leslie Fish, Broceliande, Jordin Kare, Tom Smith, Anne McCaffrey-Tania Opland-Mike Freeman, Mikey Mason, Mike Whitaker, Larry Warner, Mike Whitaker, Mark Horning, Roberta Rogow, Echo's Children, Joey Shoji, Bob Asprin & Al Frank

Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.

filkcast.blogspot.com

Current Mood: content
Current Location: back home

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Been away, came back.

Hmmm. And it's been a year since I posted, it seems. There *was* six months of chaos following the flood last year, of course. Mostly sorted (two new shelving units, lots of unpacking, packing, re-unpacking, lather-rinse-repeat) & I still have 3 tubs of what S & N packed for me stacked in the bedroom, & still haven't got rid of my archery equipment.

Various other things have happened - I went to stay with

lexin in December, & had a reasonable holiday, as usual, though I seemed to have gone almost completely deaf in my right ear just beforehand, which was ... interesting ... and has led to me getting hearing aids this year!

I went to the filk con in February, a friend died in May & I went to her funeral in early June; and I've just (on Monday) got back from another lovely 2-week stay with

lexin in Bangor, where we had numerous outings!

( List of the out and abouts )

Week one, done!

( Week Two )

I came home on Monday with a slight sense of dread, but nothing seems to have disastered this time. Tomorrow morning I have someone coming on behalf of the council to do a 'condition survey', which I do have a slight feeling of dread about, as they may be recommending a new bathroom, which I shall fight because if they do I'll probably lose my washing lines.